Eric Morse: The UN becomes the setting of a frightening game

U.S. President Barack Obama and senior advisers meet with representatives from the five Arab countries plus Iraq who have participated in air strikes against ISIS in Syria early Tuesday on September 23, 2014 in New York City. Spencer Platt / GETTY

It has not been a bad week for either Barack Obama or the United Nations. Monday evening, Obama caught the world off guard by launching disruptive airstrikes against ISIL (aka ISIS, IS, or Caliphate) assets in Syria. Warplanes from the Gulf States participated in the strikes, which are continuing.

The activity at the UN shows serious U.S. diplomatic skill. In the face of an existing Russian assertion that it would regard an attack on Syria as an act of aggression, the U.S. ambassador to the UN quietly advised the Syrian ambassador as a diplomatic courtesy that strikes against ISIS installations on Syrian soil were imminent. That may provide employment for lawyers-on-the-ground for years to come (was it an act of war?) but it was a master stroke. The Syrians promptly proclaimed that the U.S. was supporting them, the U.S. promptly denied it, the strikes went in and Russia was caught like a deer in the headlights. On Wednesday, the Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution combating terrorism, a measure Russia could not credibly oppose. Only the Chinese and Russian leaders were not present in the room for the vote, just about as weak a protest as it gets.

This sort of business is why we have a United Nations. It’s a function once filled by a Holy Roman Empire, or a Shrine of Apollo at Delphi. The organization itself may be ineffectual but it provides the forum where business gets done and occasionally, as possibly this week, it rises to be a stage for historic events.

In effect, the U.S. is now conducting war over Syria more or less on the basis that they and the Syrians try not to be in the same place at the same time so the fiction can be upheld. It wants a new doctrinal definition – “shared mutually-antagonistic battlespace”?

Analysts do not know what to make of it. Sir Lawrence Freedman, the doyen of strategic studies, noted in a Twitter conversation Tuesday that the Iraq/Syria situation is like an M.C. Escher staircase; it never leads where expected. In 5,000 years of recorded history, the international situation has never so much resembled a Risk game played with heavy munitions. But this is less than funny; it’s a recipe for fatal miscalculation.

The strikes will not be sufficient but they are necessary. ISIL may not be the world-conqueror it would have us believe but it and its maniacs have to be slowed down. Turkey seems to have cleared its decks by retrieving its hostages from Mosul and is prepared to be helpful, although how remains unclear. It is facing a horrific refugee catastrophe (upwards of half a million). Its Syrian border is one of the most difficult in the world to control; more than 1,000 years ago the Byzantine emperor Leo the Wise was writing on how to manage that frontier with not much better effect. In the end, countries like Turkey and Iran will have to do the destroying and the liberating, and the dying.

How Putin will respond remains vague, but he will respond forcefully, probably in Ukraine. There are rumours of heightened tensions in Odessa.

On the home front, ISIS propaganda is apparently having some effect. A friend from one of the more affluent suburbs confessed Wednesday that she is concerned about being beheaded in her bedroom. “Wendy,” I said sternly, “That is a totally American response. A Canadian asks, ‘what would Aline Chretien have done?’ and defends herself mightily with a small but weighty Inuit sculpture.” I was joking, but she’s worried and it suggests that people at home do need reassuring.

Eric Morse is a former Canadian diplomat who is co-chair of the Security Studies Committee of the Royal Canadian Military Institute in Toronto.

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